The BBC was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has ordered the BBC to transmit a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"As this represents a serious breach of our code, we are directing the corporation to transmit a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a schedule to be finalised," it said.
'Risk to Erode Trust'
The authority's report declared: "Our probe determined that the documentary's failure to disclose that the presenter's father occupied a post in the Hamas-administered government was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the public did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the presenter and the details he presented.
"Confidence is at the center of the connection between a television network and its public, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the risk to damage the very considerable degrees of credibility that viewers would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in February after the narrator's familial connections came to light, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in full. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
