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The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

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

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

Ofcom has directed the broadcaster to air a prime-time announcement about its decisions.

"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are directing the broadcaster to transmit a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a date to be finalised," the statement read.

'Potential to Erode Credibility'

The watchdog's statement declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the narrator's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-administered administration was materially misleading.

"Consequently that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the voice and the information he provided.

"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a broadcaster and its viewers, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.

"This oversight had the risk to damage the exceptionally strong levels of confidence that the public would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."

The programme was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it infringed the organization's content policies on accuracy.

A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards 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 Ofcom's decision in complete. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the timing and language are confirmed."