The British broadcaster committed a "major breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the presenter of a film about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has directed the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time statement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the BBC to air a statement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Erode Confidence'
The watchdog's statement said: "Our investigation concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's parent held a role in the Hamas-controlled administration was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the narrator and the information he provided.
"Confidence is at the core of the bond between a media organization and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the potential to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that audiences would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was withdrawn from the online platform in last February after the boy's family links came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the broadcaster's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the timing and language are confirmed."
