The British broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has instructed the corporation to air a evening announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are directing the broadcaster to air a announcement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The regulator's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent held a post in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their assessment of the presenter and the information he shared.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the potential to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that the public would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was pulled from iPlayer in February after the boy's familial connections came to light, and in the month of July an internal BBC review concluded it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official commented: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and language are finalised."
