The British broadcaster committed a "major breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
Ofcom has ordered the broadcaster to air a prime-time announcement about its decisions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the corporation to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Damage Confidence'
The authority's statement declared: "Our probe found that the film's lack of disclosure that the presenter's father served in a post in the Hamas-run authority was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he provided.
"Trust is at the center of the connection between a media organization and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the possibility to damage the significantly high degrees of credibility that audiences would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in last February after the presenter's familial connections came to light, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the corporation's content policies on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a significant failing in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the directive as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
