The BBC was found to have committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary 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 programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has ordered the corporation to transmit a evening statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to broadcast a announcement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Undermine Credibility'
The watchdog's statement said: "Our probe concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent held a position in the Hamas-run authority was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he shared.
"Confidence is at the heart of the connection between a television network and its viewers, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the risk to undermine the exceptionally strong amounts of credibility that the public would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
