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The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the voice of a film about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "substantially inaccurate".

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

The authority has instructed the BBC to air a peak-time statement about its findings.

"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our rules, we are directing the corporation to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," the statement read.

'Possibility to Undermine Credibility'

The authority's statement stated: "Our probe found that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's male guardian occupied a post in the Hamas-run administration was significantly deceptive.

"Consequently that the audience did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the presenter and the information he shared.

"Credibility is at the heart of the bond between a broadcaster and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This oversight had the risk to erode the very considerable amounts of credibility that the public would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."

The documentary was removed from iPlayer in February after the presenter's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it violated the broadcaster's content policies on factual correctness.

A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.

"We expressed regret for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."