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The BBC committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about Gaza was the child of a Hamas official, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

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

The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".

The authority has ordered the broadcaster to air a peak-time announcement about its findings.

"As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be confirmed," the regulator stated.

'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'

The watchdog's announcement said: "Our probe concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the presenter's parent occupied a position in the Hamas-controlled administration was significantly deceptive.

"Consequently that the audience did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their assessment of the voice and the content he shared.

"Confidence is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.

"This oversight had the possibility to damage the very considerable levels of confidence that viewers would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."

The film was withdrawn from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it violated the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.

A BBC spokesperson commented: "The authority's determination is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We have apologised for this and we agree with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will follow the directive as soon as the date and language are finalised."