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The BBC committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".

The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".

The authority has ordered the BBC to transmit a prime-time announcement about its decisions.

"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a announcement of our findings against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," it said.

'Potential to Damage Credibility'

The regulator's report stated: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-run administration was substantially inaccurate.

"Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the content he provided.

"Confidence is at the center of the bond between a media organization and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.

"This oversight had the potential to damage the significantly high amounts of confidence that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."

The programme was withdrawn from the online platform in February after the boy's family links emerged, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the corporation's content policies on truthfulness.

A representative for the broadcaster said: "The authority's determination is in line with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in full. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."