The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the narrator of a film about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has ordered the BBC to transmit a prime-time statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to air a statement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a date to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Erode Credibility'
The watchdog's report stated: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's lack of disclosure that the presenter's male guardian held a position in the Hamas-controlled administration was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their judgment of the voice and the details he shared.
"Credibility is at the center of the bond between a media organization and its audience, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This error had the potential to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was removed from the online platform in February after the presenter's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it breached the organization's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the authority's determination in full. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the date and language are finalised."
