The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the narrator of a film about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has ordered the BBC to air a prime-time statement about its conclusions.
"As this represents a significant violation of our code, we are ordering the corporation to air a announcement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a timing to be finalised," the statement read.
'Possibility to Erode Credibility'
The watchdog's announcement declared: "Our probe found that the documentary's failure to disclose that the narrator's parent served in a role in the Hamas-run government was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their judgment of the voice and the content he provided.
"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This failing had the potential to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that the public would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the boy's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it violated the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
