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The BBC was found to have committed a "major breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza was the son of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.

An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "materially misleading".

The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".

The authority has directed the broadcaster to broadcast a peak-time statement about its conclusions.

"As this represents a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a date to be determined," it said.

'Risk to Damage Trust'

The regulator's statement declared: "The inquiry we conducted found that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's father held a post in the Hamas-administered administration was substantially inaccurate.

"Consequently that the audience did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he shared.

"Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This error had the possibility to damage the significantly high levels of credibility that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."

The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.

A BBC spokesperson stated: "The regulator's decision is in line with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and language are finalised."