The BBC committed a "major breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the narrator of a film about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, 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 programme was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has ordered the corporation to transmit a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a timing to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Risk to Undermine Credibility'
The watchdog's report said: "Our probe found that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father held a role in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the public did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the voice and the content he presented.
"Confidence is at the heart of the relationship between a broadcaster and its viewers, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the possibility to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The film was removed from iPlayer in February after the presenter's personal associations emerged, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it infringed the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
