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The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the voice of a film about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.

An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "materially misleading".

The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".

The authority has instructed the BBC to transmit a prime-time declaration about its conclusions.

"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are directing the corporation to transmit a announcement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," the regulator stated.

'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'

The authority's announcement stated: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the film's failure to disclose that the narrator's parent served in a role in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive.

"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the voice and the content he provided.

"Credibility is at the core of the connection between a television network and its audience, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This error had the risk to erode the exceptionally strong levels of confidence that viewers would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."

The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the presenter's familial connections emerged, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the corporation's content policies on accuracy.

A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.

"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised."