The British broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the voice of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has ordered the corporation to air a peak-time statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are ordering the broadcaster to broadcast a announcement of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a date to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Undermine Confidence'
The regulator's announcement declared: "Our probe found that the documentary's omission to reveal that the voice's parent held a role in the Hamas-run authority was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the presenter and the information he shared.
"Confidence is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the risk to undermine the significantly high levels of confidence that audiences would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was removed from the BBC's streaming service in February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in July an internal BBC review found it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in full. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
