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The BBC committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the voice of a film about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".

The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".

The regulator has instructed the BBC to broadcast a evening announcement about its findings.

"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be confirmed," it said.

'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'

The watchdog's statement declared: "Our investigation concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's male guardian held a role in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate.

"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the presenter and the information he shared.

"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This oversight had the possibility to damage the very considerable levels of credibility that the public would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."

The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in February after the presenter's family links emerged, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the corporation's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.

A BBC spokesperson said: "The regulator's decision is in line with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which reflects clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.

"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."