The British broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
Ofcom has ordered the corporation to broadcast a prime-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our rules, we are directing the corporation to transmit a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Credibility'
The regulator's statement declared: "Our probe found that the documentary's omission to reveal that the voice's male guardian occupied a position in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their assessment of the voice and the information he shared.
"Confidence is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its public, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the possibility to undermine the very considerable amounts of credibility that audiences would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was removed from the online platform in last February after the presenter's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it violated the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The authority's determination is in line with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
