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The BBC was found to have committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the voice of a programme about Gaza was the son of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "materially misleading".

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 broadcaster to air a evening announcement about its findings.

"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be confirmed," the regulator stated.

'Possibility to Undermine Credibility'

The authority's report declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate.

"It meant that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their assessment of the narrator and the details he presented.

"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a television network and its viewers, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.

"This error had the potential to erode the significantly high amounts of credibility that the public would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."

The documentary was withdrawn from the online platform in February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.

A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will comply with the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."