The BBC was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a film about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas official, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has ordered the BBC to air a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our regulations, we are directing the BBC to air a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Risk to Undermine Confidence'
The watchdog's statement declared: "Our investigation concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the voice's male guardian held a role in the Hamas-administered administration was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the audience did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he shared.
"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the risk to undermine the exceptionally strong amounts of confidence that viewers would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in February after the boy's personal associations were revealed, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "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 broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
