The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the presenter of a film about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has ordered the corporation to transmit a prime-time statement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our code, we are ordering the BBC to air a announcement of our findings against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Risk to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's report stated: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the film's failure to disclose that the voice's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-controlled government was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Confidence is at the heart of the bond between a media organization and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the risk to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that the public would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's personal associations emerged, and in July an internal BBC review determined it breached the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
