The British broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to air a announcement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a date to be determined," the statement read.
'Risk to Erode Credibility'
The regulator's report said: "Our investigation determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's father served in a post in the Hamas-run authority was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a broadcaster and its public, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This failing had the potential to damage the significantly high degrees of confidence that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in February after the boy's personal associations came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry found it violated the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the directive as soon as the date and wording are determined."
