The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
Ofcom has directed the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time statement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Erode Credibility'
The authority's announcement stated: "Our investigation determined that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent occupied a post in the Hamas-administered government was materially misleading.
"It meant that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Confidence is at the core 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 undermine the significantly high degrees of confidence that the public would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's personal associations were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which reflects clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
