The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the broadcaster to broadcast a evening declaration about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our regulations, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Erode Trust'
The watchdog's report said: "Our probe determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's father held a role in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the voice and the information he shared.
"Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a television network and its audience, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the possibility to undermine the exceptionally strong levels of trust that the public would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in February after the boy's family links were revealed, and in July an internal BBC review concluded it breached the corporation's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which reflects clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the date and language are determined."
