The British broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the narrator of a programme about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has instructed the broadcaster to air a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are instructing the broadcaster to air a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Potential to Damage Confidence'
The regulator's statement declared: "Our probe found that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's father occupied a post in the Hamas-controlled authority was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the audience did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their judgment of the presenter and the content he presented.
"Confidence 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 error had the possibility to erode the significantly high levels of credibility that the public would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was removed from iPlayer in February after the boy's family links were revealed, and in July an internal BBC review found it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
