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The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".

The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".

Ofcom has instructed the corporation to transmit a peak-time announcement about its conclusions.

"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the broadcaster to air a announcement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be finalised," it said.

'Possibility to Erode Confidence'

The authority's statement stated: "Our investigation determined that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the presenter's male guardian occupied a post in the Hamas-administered administration was significantly deceptive.

"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their judgment of the voice and the information he provided.

"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This failing had the risk to erode the very considerable amounts of credibility that viewers would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."

The documentary was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.

A BBC spokesperson stated: "The regulator's decision is in line with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the date and language are confirmed."