The BBC was found to have committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has instructed the broadcaster to transmit a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a message of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be finalised," it said.
'Potential to Erode Confidence'
The regulator's statement declared: "Our probe determined that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent held a role in the Hamas-run authority was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their judgment of the presenter and the content he provided.
"Confidence is at the core of the connection between a television network and its audience, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"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 Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from the online platform in last February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the broadcaster's content policies on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in full. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
