The BBC was found to have committed a "major breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has instructed the corporation to transmit a peak-time statement about its decisions.
"As this represents a significant violation of our regulations, we are directing the broadcaster to broadcast a announcement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Erode Trust'
The regulator's announcement declared: "Our probe determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-administered administration was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he presented.
"Confidence is at the core of the connection between a broadcaster and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to erode the significantly high degrees of confidence that the public would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was withdrawn from the online platform in February after the boy's family links emerged, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it breached the organization's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which reflects clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in full. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and language are finalised."
