The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the narrator of a film about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
Ofcom has ordered the broadcaster to air a prime-time statement about its conclusions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to transmit a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a timing to be finalised," the statement read.
'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'
The watchdog's statement declared: "Our investigation found that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled authority was materially misleading.
"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the presenter and the details he presented.
"Confidence is at the heart of the connection between a television network and its viewers, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This error had the possibility to undermine the very considerable amounts of trust that the public would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it breached the corporation's content policies on accuracy.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in full. We will follow the directive as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
