The BBC committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has directed the corporation to broadcast a evening announcement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to air a statement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Possibility to Undermine Trust'
The authority's statement declared: "Our investigation determined that the programme's lack of disclosure that the presenter's parent served in a post in the Hamas-run government was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the voice and the information he provided.
"Credibility is at the core of the connection between a television network and its audience, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This failing had the risk to undermine the significantly high levels of confidence that audiences would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The film was withdrawn from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
