The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas representative, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"As this represents a significant violation of our code, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be determined," it said.
'Risk to Damage Trust'
The authority's announcement said: "Our investigation concluded that the documentary's failure to disclose that the presenter's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-run authority was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their assessment of the presenter and the content he presented.
"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a broadcaster and its audience, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the risk to undermine the very considerable amounts of trust that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was withdrawn from iPlayer in the month of February after the presenter's family links emerged, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it violated the organization's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the authority's determination in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the timing and language are confirmed."
