The public service broadcaster engaged in 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 representative, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has directed the BBC to transmit a prime-time statement about its conclusions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Potential to Damage Credibility'
The authority's statement declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's failure to disclose that the presenter's father served in a role in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he provided.
"Confidence is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its public, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the potential to undermine the very considerable levels of credibility that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The film was removed from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's personal associations were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the broadcaster's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official stated: "The authority's determination is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the authority's determination in complete. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
