The BBC was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the narrator of a film about Gaza was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has instructed the BBC to transmit a peak-time statement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are directing the broadcaster to transmit a announcement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a date to be confirmed," it said.
'Risk to Damage Trust'
The watchdog's announcement declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-administered administration was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Trust is at the center of the connection between a media organization and its viewers, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the risk to undermine the significantly high levels of credibility that audiences would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was withdrawn from the online platform in February after the boy's personal associations were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it violated the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which reflects 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 follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and language are determined."
