The public service broadcaster committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film 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 ordered the BBC to air a peak-time statement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Damage Trust'
The watchdog's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's lack of disclosure that the presenter's parent occupied a position in the Hamas-controlled government was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the audience did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their assessment of the narrator and the content he provided.
"Trust is at the heart of the bond between a broadcaster and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the risk to undermine the significantly high degrees of credibility that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's personal associations were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the organization's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which reflects clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."
