🔗 Share this article

The BBC committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas representative, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.

An probe by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".

The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".

The regulator has instructed the corporation to transmit a peak-time declaration about its decisions.

"As this represents a major infringement of our code, we are directing the broadcaster to broadcast a announcement of our findings against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," the statement read.

'Potential to Damage Trust'

The regulator's statement said: "Our probe determined that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent held a post in the Hamas-administered government was materially misleading.

"This implied that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the voice and the content he shared.

"Trust is at the heart of the connection between a television network and its audience, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.

"This oversight had the risk to undermine the significantly high degrees of confidence that audiences would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."

The film was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in February after the boy's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on accuracy.

A corporation official stated: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.

"We have apologised for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the schedule and language are finalised."