🔗 Share this article British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Major' Violation of Broadcasting Regulations, States Broadcasting Watchdog The British broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom. An inquiry by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "materially misleading". The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness". The authority has instructed the BBC to air a peak-time announcement about its conclusions. "Given this constitutes a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a announcement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a schedule to be finalised," the statement read. 'Possibility to Undermine Confidence' The authority's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted found that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father held a post in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate. "It meant that the audience did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their assessment of the presenter and the information he presented. "Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a television network and its viewers, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster. "This failing had the potential to damage the very considerable degrees of confidence that the public would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza." The film was removed from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the presenter's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it violated the organization's content policies on factual correctness. A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards. "We expressed regret for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the directive as soon as the schedule and language are determined."