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The public service broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

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

The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".

Ofcom has ordered the broadcaster to transmit a evening announcement about its conclusions.

"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the BBC to air a message of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a date to be determined," the statement read.

'Possibility to Damage Credibility'

The authority's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-run government was materially misleading.

"It meant that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their judgment of the voice and the details he presented.

"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its public, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.

"This error had the risk to erode the very considerable levels of trust that the public would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."

The programme was pulled from iPlayer in February after the boy's personal associations came to light, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it violated the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on accuracy.

A BBC spokesperson stated: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the date and language are confirmed."