🔗 Share this article

The BBC committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a film about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.

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

The BBC's director general had previously apologised, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".

Ofcom has instructed the corporation to transmit a prime-time statement about its decisions.

"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be confirmed," the statement read.

'Potential to Undermine Confidence'

The regulator's announcement said: "Our probe found that the film's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent served in a role in the Hamas-run authority was materially misleading.

"This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the voice and the content he shared.

"Confidence is at the center of the bond between a media organization and its viewers, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This failing had the potential to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of trust that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."

The documentary was removed from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the presenter's familial connections came to light, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it violated the corporation's editorial guidelines on accuracy.

A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The regulator's decision is in line with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.

"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."