The British broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has directed the corporation to broadcast a peak-time statement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a timing to be determined," the statement read.
'Risk to Erode Confidence'
The authority's statement declared: "Our investigation concluded that the documentary's failure to disclose that the narrator's father occupied a post in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the voice and the information he shared.
"Credibility is at the heart of the bond between a media organization and its viewers, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to undermine the significantly high amounts of confidence that the public would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was removed from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the boy's personal associations came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry determined it infringed the organization's content policies on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The regulator's decision is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in full. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
