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The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the voice of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas official, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.

An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".

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

The authority has instructed the BBC to air a prime-time announcement about its decisions.

"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a date to be determined," the regulator stated.

'Possibility to Undermine Credibility'

The regulator's announcement declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's father occupied a post in the Hamas-administered administration was significantly deceptive.

"This implied that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the presenter and the content he presented.

"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its viewers, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.

"This failing had the potential to undermine the significantly high levels of confidence that the public would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."

The film was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it violated the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.

A corporation official commented: "The authority's determination 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 truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.

"We have apologised for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in full. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."