The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a film about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas official, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has ordered the BBC to air a peak-time declaration about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to broadcast a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a timing to be finalised," the statement read.
'Potential to Damage Credibility'
The watchdog's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the film's lack of disclosure that the voice's father occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled authority was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently 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.
"Trust is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its audience, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to undermine the exceptionally strong levels of confidence that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in February after the boy's family links were revealed, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it breached the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in full. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and language are confirmed."
