The British broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a film about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has directed the corporation to air a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our regulations, we are instructing the corporation to air a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Damage Credibility'
The watchdog's report said: "The inquiry we conducted found that the film's omission to reveal that the narrator's male guardian occupied a position in the Hamas-run administration was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Trust is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the potential to undermine the exceptionally strong levels of confidence that viewers would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was removed from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The authority's determination is in line with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in full. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and language are determined."
