🔗 Share this article BBC Gaza Film Ruled a 'Major' Infringement of Media Rules, States UK Media Regulator The BBC committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom. An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate". The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness". Ofcom has instructed the broadcaster to broadcast a peak-time statement about its findings. "As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," it said. 'Possibility to Erode Trust' The watchdog's report said: "Our probe concluded that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent served in a position in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate. "Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the voice and the content he provided. "Credibility is at the center of the bond between a television network and its audience, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster. "This error had the risk to undermine the significantly high amounts of confidence that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza." The film was pulled from iPlayer in February after the boy's family links were revealed, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it violated the broadcaster's content policies on factual correctness. A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a significant failing in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations. "We expressed regret for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."