The British broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza was the son of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has ordered the corporation to air a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the broadcaster to air a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be finalised," the statement read.
'Possibility to Erode Confidence'
The watchdog's report declared: "Our investigation found that the film's omission to reveal that the voice's father occupied a position in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the details he shared.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its audience, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the potential to damage the very considerable degrees of credibility that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's familial connections came to light, and in July an internal BBC review concluded it infringed the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in full. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the date and language are finalised."
