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The public service broadcaster committed a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.

An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "significantly deceptive".

The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to accuracy".

The regulator has instructed the BBC to air a prime-time statement about its conclusions.

"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our code, we are ordering the corporation to air a announcement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be confirmed," it said.

'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'

The watchdog's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's lack of disclosure that the presenter's parent occupied a role in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.

"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he shared.

"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.

"This error had the risk to damage the very considerable degrees of confidence that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."

The programme was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's personal associations were revealed, and in this past July an internal BBC review determined it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.

A corporation official commented: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 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 directive as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."