The BBC committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child 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 "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to transmit a peak-time statement about its findings.
"As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to broadcast a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a timing to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Erode Confidence'
The regulator's report stated: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's male guardian served in a position in the Hamas-run government was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the audience did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the narrator and the details he provided.
"Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a broadcaster and its public, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This failing had the potential to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of trust that viewers would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was removed from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry determined it breached the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the timing and language are confirmed."
