The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas official, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has directed the BBC to air a peak-time statement about its conclusions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our rules, we are directing the BBC to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a timing to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Damage Confidence'
The watchdog's announcement stated: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the documentary's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent occupied a position in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the public did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their judgment of the presenter and the content he presented.
"Credibility is at the center of the bond between a media organization and its public, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the possibility to damage the significantly high degrees of confidence that the public would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and language are determined."
