The BBC committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The authority has instructed the broadcaster to broadcast a evening statement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to air a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.
'Possibility to Undermine Credibility'
The watchdog's statement said: "Our probe determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's parent held a position in the Hamas-run government was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the public did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a television network and its public, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the possibility to erode the very considerable amounts of credibility that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it breached the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The authority's determination is in line with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which reflects clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the authority's determination in complete. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
