The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a film about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas official, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has directed the corporation to broadcast a prime-time announcement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are ordering the corporation to broadcast a announcement of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Trust'
The authority's report declared: "Our probe determined that the film's omission to reveal that the narrator's male guardian occupied a role in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the voice and the information he shared.
"Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its public, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This error had the risk to damage the exceptionally strong levels of confidence that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The film was removed from the online platform in the month of February after the boy's family links came to light, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it infringed the corporation's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A corporation official commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in full. We will follow the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
