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The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the voice of a documentary about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

An probe by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".

The head of the BBC had previously apologised, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".

The authority has ordered the broadcaster to air a peak-time announcement about its findings.

"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the broadcaster to air a statement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," the regulator stated.

'Possibility to Undermine Credibility'

The regulator's statement declared: "Our investigation found that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the narrator's male guardian occupied a position in the Hamas-run government was materially misleading.

"Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their judgment of the voice and the information he provided.

"Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a television network and its public, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This failing had the risk to damage the significantly high degrees of trust that viewers would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."

The film was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the boy's family links came to light, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it breached the broadcaster's journalistic standards on truthfulness.

A BBC spokesperson commented: "The authority's determination is in line with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.

"We expressed regret for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and language are determined."