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The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "substantially inaccurate".

The BBC's director general had previously apologised, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".

The regulator has ordered the BBC to broadcast a evening statement about its decisions.

"As this represents a significant violation of our rules, we are instructing the corporation to transmit a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a date to be determined," the statement read.

'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'

The watchdog's announcement declared: "Our investigation concluded that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the voice's parent held a position in the Hamas-controlled administration was materially misleading.

"It meant that the audience did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their assessment of the presenter and the content he presented.

"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a broadcaster and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This failing had the potential to damage the very considerable degrees of trust that the public would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."

The programme was pulled from the online platform in February after the narrator's familial connections came to light, and in July an internal BBC review concluded it breached the organization's content policies on factual correctness.

A representative for the broadcaster said: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.

"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."