The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas representative, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to air a peak-time statement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a timing to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Damage Trust'
The watchdog's announcement stated: "Our investigation found that the documentary's failure to disclose that the presenter's parent held a position in the Hamas-controlled authority was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their assessment of the narrator and the details he shared.
"Credibility is at the heart of the bond between a media organization and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the possibility to erode the very considerable degrees of trust that audiences would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was removed from the online platform in the month of February after the boy's personal associations came to light, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it violated the corporation's content policies on accuracy.
A corporation official commented: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the authority's determination in complete. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
