The public service broadcaster committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the presenter of a film about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has directed the BBC to transmit a evening statement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our regulations, we are directing the BBC to transmit a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a date to be determined," it said.
'Risk to Damage Confidence'
The watchdog's announcement declared: "Our probe determined that the documentary's omission to reveal that the voice's parent served in a role in the Hamas-controlled government was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their assessment of the presenter and the details he presented.
"Credibility is at the center of the bond between a broadcaster and its viewers, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the possibility to damage the very considerable amounts of confidence that the public would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's personal associations were revealed, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The authority's determination is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we agree with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
