The British broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has ordered the BBC to transmit a prime-time statement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our regulations, we are instructing the broadcaster to transmit a announcement of our findings against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Undermine Credibility'
The authority's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted found that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the presenter's male guardian occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled government was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the details he shared.
"Confidence is at the heart of the bond between a broadcaster and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the risk to erode the very considerable degrees of credibility that viewers would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the authority's determination in complete. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and language are confirmed."
