The public service broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas representative, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The authority has directed the corporation to broadcast a evening announcement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to air a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Damage Trust'
The authority's announcement said: "Our investigation determined that the programme's omission to reveal that the voice's parent served in a role in the Hamas-controlled authority was materially misleading.
"This implied that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the voice and the information he shared.
"Confidence is at the center of the connection between a media organization and its viewers, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the potential to undermine the exceptionally strong amounts of trust that audiences would have put in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was removed from iPlayer in last February after the boy's family links were revealed, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
