The public service broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has instructed the BBC to transmit a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a timing to be determined," it said.
'Potential to Erode Credibility'
The regulator's statement declared: "Our probe found that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's father held a role in the Hamas-run government was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their judgment of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Confidence is at the heart of the bond between a media organization and its viewers, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the possibility to erode the significantly high degrees of credibility that the public would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's familial connections came to light, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the organization's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
