The British broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has ordered the broadcaster to transmit a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering 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 date to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Damage Trust'
The watchdog's statement said: "Our investigation concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the narrator's father served in a post in the Hamas-administered government was materially misleading.
"This implied that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he shared.
"Credibility is at the core of the bond between a media organization and its public, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the risk to damage the very considerable levels of trust that the public would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in February after the narrator's personal associations were revealed, and in the month of July an internal BBC review determined it violated the broadcaster's content policies on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance 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 accuracy, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and language are determined."
