The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas representative, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has instructed the corporation to broadcast a evening statement about its conclusions.
"As this represents a significant violation of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to air a statement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be determined," the statement read.
'Potential to Undermine Credibility'
The watchdog's announcement declared: "The inquiry we conducted found that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father held a position in the Hamas-controlled authority was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he provided.
"Confidence is at the center of the connection between a television network and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the potential to damage the significantly high amounts of confidence that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from the online platform in February after the presenter's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the corporation's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official commented: "The authority's determination is in line with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
