The BBC was found to have committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas representative, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has ordered the BBC to transmit a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the broadcaster to air a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Undermine Trust'
The watchdog's statement declared: "Our investigation found that the programme's lack of disclosure that the voice's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-administered administration was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the presenter and the information he provided.
"Credibility is at the heart of the bond between a television network and its viewers, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This failing had the possibility to undermine the significantly high amounts of credibility that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the boy's family links came to light, and in this past July an internal BBC review concluded it infringed the corporation's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official commented: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in full. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and language are determined."
