The BBC committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules 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 inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has instructed the corporation to transmit a prime-time declaration about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the corporation to air a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a timing to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Erode Confidence'
The regulator's announcement declared: "Our probe found that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the presenter's parent served in a post in the Hamas-administered administration was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the information he shared.
"Trust is at the center of the connection between a media organization and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the possibility to erode the exceptionally strong amounts of trust that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The film was withdrawn from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's familial connections emerged, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the broadcaster's content policies on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the authority's determination in full. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
