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The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas representative, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.

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

The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".

The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time statement about its decisions.

"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our code, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a announcement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a timing to be confirmed," the statement read.

'Risk to Erode Trust'

The watchdog's announcement stated: "Our probe concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the voice's father served in a role in the Hamas-administered authority was substantially inaccurate.

"This implied that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he provided.

"Trust is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This failing had the possibility to damage the significantly high amounts of trust that audiences would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."

The programme was pulled from iPlayer in February after the presenter's familial connections were revealed, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.

A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.

"We issued an apology for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the timing and language are finalised."