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The British broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas official, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme 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 serious error in relation to accuracy".

Ofcom has directed the corporation to transmit a prime-time announcement about its findings.

"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our rules, we are directing the corporation to broadcast a statement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a date to be determined," the regulator stated.

'Risk to Erode Credibility'

The watchdog's report said: "Our investigation concluded that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the presenter's male guardian served in a post in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.

"Consequently that the audience did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the voice and the content he shared.

"Confidence is at the core of the connection between a television network and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.

"This failing had the risk to damage the very considerable amounts of trust that the public would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."

The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in February after the presenter's family links were revealed, and in this past July an internal BBC review concluded it violated the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy.

A corporation official commented: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.

"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 schedule and wording are determined."