The BBC committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has ordered the broadcaster to transmit a evening statement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Damage Credibility'
The regulator's announcement declared: "The inquiry we conducted found that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's father occupied a post in the Hamas-run authority was materially misleading.
"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the voice and the information he shared.
"Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a broadcaster and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the possibility to undermine the very considerable levels of confidence that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the boy's family links emerged, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
