🔗 Share this article British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Significant' Breach of Media Regulations, States UK Media Regulator The BBC committed a "major breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the voice of a programme about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom. An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate". The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy". The regulator has instructed the corporation to transmit a peak-time declaration about its decisions. "As this represents a major infringement of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," it said. 'Possibility to Undermine Credibility' The watchdog's report stated: "The inquiry we conducted found that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's male guardian occupied a post in the Hamas-administered administration was significantly deceptive. "Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the voice and the information he presented. "Confidence is at the heart of the bond between a television network and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC. "This oversight had the potential to erode the very considerable amounts of credibility that the public would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war." The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness. A BBC spokesperson commented: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which corresponds to 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 adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."