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The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the voice of a programme about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "materially misleading".

The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".

Ofcom has instructed the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time statement about its decisions.

"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a date to be determined," the regulator stated.

'Risk to Undermine Credibility'

The regulator's report stated: "Our probe concluded that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the presenter's father occupied a position in the Hamas-controlled authority was materially misleading.

"Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the narrator and the details he provided.

"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its public, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.

"This error had the potential to erode the very considerable amounts of credibility that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."

The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in February after the presenter's familial connections were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it violated the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.

A BBC spokesperson stated: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and language are determined."