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The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.

An probe by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".

The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".

The authority has directed the BBC to broadcast a evening declaration about its decisions.

"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a statement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.

'Possibility to Damage Trust'

The regulator's announcement stated: "Our investigation determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's father held a role in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.

"Consequently that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he shared.

"Confidence is at the center of the bond between a media organization and its audience, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.

"This error had the potential to erode the exceptionally strong amounts of confidence that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."

The film was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the narrator's familial connections came to light, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it violated the organization's journalistic standards on accuracy.

A corporation official said: "The regulator's decision is in line with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.

"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are determined."