The BBC engaged in a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the narrator of a film about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has instructed the corporation to transmit a prime-time declaration about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our code, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The regulator's report declared: "Our probe determined that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's male guardian held a position in the Hamas-run government was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the presenter and the content he shared.
"Confidence is at the heart of the bond between a broadcaster and its public, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This failing had the potential to erode the very considerable degrees of trust that the public would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from the online platform in last February after the boy's family links came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
