The British broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the voice of a film about Gaza was the son of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the broadcaster to transmit a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a date to be finalised," the statement read.
'Possibility to Undermine Trust'
The authority's report stated: "Our probe found that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the voice and the information he shared.
"Trust is at the heart of the connection between a broadcaster and its audience, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the potential to damage the exceptionally strong amounts of trust that viewers would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from the online platform in last February after the boy's familial connections emerged, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A corporation official said: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which reflects clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
