The public service broadcaster committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas representative, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has ordered the corporation to air a peak-time statement about its conclusions.
"As this represents a significant violation of our regulations, we are ordering the BBC to air a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be determined," the statement read.
'Potential to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's announcement declared: "Our investigation concluded that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the voice's male guardian occupied a post in the Hamas-run government was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Confidence is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This failing had the risk to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the presenter's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official said: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the directive as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
