The British broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the presenter of a film about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has directed the BBC to broadcast a evening declaration about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our regulations, we are ordering the broadcaster to air a announcement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Risk to Damage Credibility'
The authority's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the programme's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent served in a position in the Hamas-run authority was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the voice and the details he presented.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its viewers, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the potential to undermine the exceptionally strong amounts of credibility that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The film was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's familial connections emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review determined it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The regulator's decision is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."
