The BBC committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has instructed the BBC to broadcast a peak-time declaration about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a announcement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a date to be finalised," it said.
'Possibility to Erode Credibility'
The watchdog's statement declared: "Our investigation concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent held a post in the Hamas-administered government was materially misleading.
"This implied that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their judgment of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Credibility is at the core of the connection between a television network and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the risk to undermine the very considerable amounts of confidence 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 narrator's familial connections came to light, and in July an internal BBC review found it violated the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the directive as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."
