The BBC committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to transmit a evening statement about its findings.
"As this represents a major infringement of our rules, we are directing the broadcaster to transmit a statement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Erode Credibility'
The authority's statement declared: "The inquiry we conducted found that the documentary's failure to disclose that the narrator's male guardian occupied a role in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the audience did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the presenter and the content he shared.
"Credibility is at the heart of the bond between a broadcaster and its audience, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the potential to damage the very considerable amounts of trust that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was removed from the online platform in last February after the boy's familial connections were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the broadcaster's content policies on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in full. We will comply with the directive as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
