The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has ordered the corporation to air a prime-time statement about its conclusions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the BBC to air a statement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a timing to be determined," the statement read.
'Potential to Erode Credibility'
The watchdog's announcement stated: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled administration was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he provided.
"Credibility is at the core of the bond between a broadcaster and its audience, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the potential to damage the very considerable amounts of confidence that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was removed from the online platform in the month of February after the boy's family links emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it breached the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which reflects clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
