The BBC committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to broadcast a peak-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to air a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The authority's announcement declared: "Our investigation concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent occupied a role in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
"It meant that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the information he shared.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the risk to undermine the significantly high levels of confidence that viewers would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from the online platform in February after the boy's family links came to light, and in July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the organization's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
