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The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the voice of a programme about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.

An investigation by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".

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

The regulator has directed the broadcaster to transmit a evening declaration about its conclusions.

"As this represents a major infringement of our rules, we are directing the BBC to air a announcement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a timing to be determined," the regulator stated.

'Possibility to Erode Confidence'

The watchdog's statement stated: "Our probe concluded that the film's lack of disclosure that the voice's father held a post in the Hamas-administered authority was substantially inaccurate.

"Consequently that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their judgment of the voice and the details he shared.

"Trust is at the heart of the bond between a media organization and its viewers, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.

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

The documentary was withdrawn from iPlayer in February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it breached the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.

A corporation official commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.

"We issued an apology for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in full. We will follow the directive as soon as the date and wording are finalised."