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The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the presenter of a film about Gaza was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.

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

The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".

The regulator has ordered the BBC to transmit a prime-time statement about its decisions.

"As this represents a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the corporation to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be finalised," the statement read.

'Possibility to Undermine Credibility'

The watchdog's report said: "Our probe determined that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent served in a position in the Hamas-run administration was significantly deceptive.

"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he provided.

"Trust is at the heart of the connection between a media organization and its audience, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This oversight had the risk to undermine the significantly high levels of confidence that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."

The film was removed from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the boy's familial connections came to light, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it violated the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.

A BBC spokesperson stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.

"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the authority's determination in full. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."