The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas official, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has ordered the broadcaster to air a peak-time declaration about its findings.
"As this represents a major infringement of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be finalised," the statement read.
'Risk to Damage Credibility'
The watchdog's report declared: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's father occupied a role in the Hamas-administered government was materially misleading.
"This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their judgment of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Trust is at the heart of the bond between a television network and its audience, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the potential to erode the very considerable degrees of confidence that viewers would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in February after the boy's family links were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the broadcaster's content policies on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which reflects clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in full. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and wording are determined."
