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The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the presenter of a film about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas representative, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.

An probe by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".

The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".

The authority has ordered the BBC to air a peak-time statement about its findings.

"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are ordering the corporation to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be confirmed," the regulator stated.

'Risk to Damage Credibility'

The watchdog's statement said: "Our probe concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's father occupied a role in the Hamas-administered administration was materially misleading.

"Consequently that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he shared.

"Confidence is at the center of the bond between a television network and its viewers, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.

"This error had the potential to damage the significantly high levels of trust that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."

The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry determined it breached the organization's journalistic standards on factual correctness.

A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We have apologised 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 confirmed."