The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has directed the BBC to air a prime-time statement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the BBC to air a statement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a timing to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Erode Credibility'
The authority's report stated: "Our probe determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's male guardian occupied a post in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the narrator and the content he provided.
"Trust is at the core of the bond between a television network and its viewers, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This error had the risk to undermine the significantly high degrees of credibility that viewers would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in February after the narrator's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it violated the corporation's content policies on accuracy.
A corporation official commented: "The regulator's decision is in line with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."
