The public service broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas official, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the corporation to transmit a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Damage Trust'
The watchdog's statement stated: "Our investigation found that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the voice and the details he shared.
"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a broadcaster and its audience, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the risk to erode the significantly high amounts of trust that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was removed from iPlayer in last February after the presenter's familial connections were revealed, and in July an internal BBC review found it violated the organization's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, 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 regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the directive as soon as the schedule and language are finalised."
