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The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the voice of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

An probe by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".

The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".

The regulator has instructed the BBC to transmit a evening announcement about its conclusions.

"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the broadcaster to broadcast a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a schedule to be confirmed," the regulator stated.

'Possibility to Undermine Trust'

The authority's announcement declared: "Our investigation concluded that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the voice's parent served in a role in the Hamas-controlled administration was materially misleading.

"Consequently that the audience did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the presenter and the content he provided.

"Confidence is at the heart of the bond between a television network and its public, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This failing had the potential to damage the exceptionally strong levels of confidence that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."

The programme was removed from the online platform in the month of February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it breached the broadcaster's content policies on factual correctness.

A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We issued an apology for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."