The public service broadcaster committed a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the BBC to broadcast a prime-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a date to be finalised," the statement read.
'Risk to Erode Trust'
The authority's report stated: "Our probe concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the narrator's male guardian held a position in the Hamas-administered authority was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he shared.
"Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a broadcaster and its public, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the potential to damage the significantly high degrees of credibility that the public would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the boy's family links were revealed, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it violated the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official stated: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the directive as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
