The British broadcaster committed a "major breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has directed the BBC to air a evening statement about its decisions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Damage Confidence'
The authority's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted found that the documentary's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent held a position in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the public did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the voice and the content he presented.
"Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a broadcaster and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the potential to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was removed from the online platform in last February after the boy's familial connections were revealed, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it infringed the organization's content policies on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
