The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has ordered the corporation to air a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our rules, we are directing the broadcaster to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a date to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'
The regulator's announcement stated: "Our probe concluded that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father served in a position in the Hamas-administered authority was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he shared.
"Trust is at the center of the connection between a television network and its viewers, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the risk to erode the significantly high amounts of credibility that viewers would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was removed from the online platform in February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in the month of July an internal BBC review found it infringed the broadcaster's content policies on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and language are confirmed."
