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The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the presenter of a film about Gaza was the son of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.

An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled 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 accuracy".

The authority has directed the corporation to broadcast a peak-time statement about its findings.

"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a date to be finalised," the statement read.

'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'

The regulator's statement said: "Our investigation concluded that the film's failure to disclose that the presenter's parent served in a post in the Hamas-run administration was significantly deceptive.

"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the narrator and the details he provided.

"Trust is at the core of the connection between a media organization and its public, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.

"This oversight had the potential to damage the significantly high amounts of credibility that audiences would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."

The documentary was removed from the BBC's streaming service in February after the presenter's personal associations emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review concluded it infringed the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.

A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.

"We expressed regret for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in full. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."