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The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

An investigation 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 earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".

The regulator has instructed the BBC to air a prime-time announcement about its decisions.

"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to air a message of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a timing to be finalised," the statement read.

'Possibility to Erode Credibility'

The watchdog's report declared: "Our probe concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent held a role in the Hamas-administered authority was significantly deceptive.

"It meant that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he presented.

"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This failing had the risk to undermine the significantly high levels of trust that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."

The programme was withdrawn from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's personal associations came to light, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the corporation's editorial guidelines on accuracy.

A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.

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