The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has ordered the corporation to air a prime-time statement about its conclusions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our regulations, we are directing the corporation to transmit a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a date to be finalised," the statement read.
'Potential to Undermine Credibility'
The authority's statement declared: "Our probe determined that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's father served in a post in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the voice and the information he shared.
"Confidence is at the heart of the connection between a media organization and its viewers, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the risk to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that viewers would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was withdrawn from the online platform in last February after the narrator's personal associations were revealed, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
