The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the presenter of a film about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas representative, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "materially misleading".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has ordered the BBC to air a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our regulations, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a statement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a date to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The watchdog's statement declared: "Our investigation determined that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent occupied a role in the Hamas-run authority was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their judgment of the narrator and the details he shared.
"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its public, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This failing had the risk to undermine the significantly high levels of credibility that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was removed from the online platform in the month of February after the boy's personal associations came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The regulator's decision is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in full. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the timing and language are finalised."
