The public service broadcaster committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas official, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has ordered the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time declaration about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a message of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Damage Credibility'
The watchdog's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the film's failure to disclose that the narrator's father held a role in the Hamas-administered authority was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the voice and the content he shared.
"Credibility is at the core of the bond between a media organization and its viewers, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the possibility to erode the significantly high levels of credibility that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was removed from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the boy's personal associations emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review determined it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the directive as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."
