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The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to regulatory body Ofcom.

An inquiry by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "materially misleading".

The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".

Ofcom has directed the corporation to broadcast a prime-time statement about its decisions.

"As this represents a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the broadcaster to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," the regulator stated.

'Risk to Damage Trust'

The authority's report said: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the film's failure to disclose that the voice's father held a post in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.

"Consequently that the public did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the presenter and the content he shared.

"Credibility is at the heart of the bond between a broadcaster and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.

"This error had the possibility to erode the exceptionally strong amounts of confidence that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."

The programme was removed from the online platform in February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it violated the organization's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.

A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We issued an apology for this and we accept the authority's determination in full. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."