The BBC was found to have committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas representative, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has ordered the corporation to transmit a evening declaration about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our code, we are directing the broadcaster to air a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," the statement read.
'Risk to Damage Confidence'
The watchdog's statement declared: "The inquiry we conducted found that the documentary's failure to disclose that the narrator's father served in a post in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he provided.
"Confidence is at the heart of the bond between a broadcaster and its viewers, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the potential to damage the significantly high amounts of credibility that the public would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the presenter's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review concluded it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."
