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The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the voice of a programme about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas official, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.

An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".

The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".

The regulator has ordered the broadcaster to air a evening declaration about its conclusions.

"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the corporation to transmit a announcement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a date to be finalised," it said.

'Potential to Erode Trust'

The regulator's statement declared: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the programme's omission to reveal that the voice's father held a role in the Hamas-controlled authority was significantly deceptive.

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

"Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a broadcaster and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.

"This oversight had the risk to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that the public would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."

The film was withdrawn from the online platform in the month of February after the presenter's personal associations were revealed, and in July an internal BBC review found it infringed the broadcaster's content policies on factual correctness.

A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.

"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the schedule and language are determined."