🔗 Share this article BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Violation of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog The BBC was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom. An inquiry by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "significantly deceptive". The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness". Ofcom has ordered the broadcaster to transmit a evening announcement about its conclusions. "Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a announcement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," it said. 'Potential to Erode Credibility' The regulator's report stated: "Our probe concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive. "It meant that the audience did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the presenter and the information he presented. "Trust is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation. "This error had the possibility to erode the significantly high amounts of credibility that audiences would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war." The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the boy's familial connections emerged, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it breached the corporation's content policies on factual correctness. A BBC spokesperson said: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations. "We have apologised for this and we agree with the authority's determination in full. We will follow the directive as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."