The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the voice of a film about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "materially misleading".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
Ofcom has ordered the broadcaster to broadcast a evening declaration about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are directing the corporation to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be finalised," it said.
'Risk to Undermine Trust'
The watchdog's statement said: "Our investigation determined that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father held a position in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the voice and the information he presented.
"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its public, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the possibility to damage the significantly high levels of confidence that audiences would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was withdrawn from the online platform in the month of February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review found it violated the corporation's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the timing and language are determined."
