The British broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has directed the corporation to broadcast a evening declaration about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Erode Confidence'
The watchdog's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the presenter's male guardian occupied a role in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
"It meant that the audience did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the narrator and the details he provided.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the possibility to erode the significantly high amounts of trust that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was pulled from the online platform in February after the boy's personal associations were revealed, and in July an internal BBC review determined it breached the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
