The BBC committed a "major breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the presenter of a film about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has directed the BBC to broadcast a prime-time statement about its findings.
"As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to broadcast a announcement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be finalised," it said.
'Risk to Damage Credibility'
The authority's statement declared: "Our investigation found that the documentary's failure to disclose that the voice's father held a post in the Hamas-run government was materially misleading.
"This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he provided.
"Trust is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its public, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the possibility to damage the significantly high amounts of confidence that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The film was pulled from iPlayer in February after the boy's familial connections were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
