The public service broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the broadcaster to air a prime-time announcement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a schedule to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Undermine Trust'
The regulator's report said: "Our probe determined that the film's omission to reveal that the narrator's father served in a position in the Hamas-run authority was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the details he provided.
"Credibility is at the center of the bond between a broadcaster and its viewers, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the possibility to damage the very considerable degrees of credibility that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was withdrawn from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it breached the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in full. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
