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The British broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the presenter of a programme about Gaza was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

An investigation by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive".

The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".

Ofcom has instructed the corporation to air a prime-time declaration about its conclusions.

"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a announcement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a schedule to be confirmed," the regulator stated.

'Risk to Damage Credibility'

The regulator's report declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the narrator's father served in a post in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate.

"Consequently that the public did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the content he presented.

"Trust is at the center of the bond between a broadcaster and its audience, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This oversight had the possibility to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."

The documentary was removed from iPlayer in February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in this past July an internal BBC review determined it violated the broadcaster's journalistic standards on truthfulness.

A BBC spokesperson commented: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."