🔗 Share this article BBC Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, Says UK Media Regulator The BBC was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, according to regulatory body Ofcom. An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate". The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy". The regulator has directed the BBC to transmit a prime-time declaration about its decisions. "Given this constitutes a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the broadcaster to transmit a announcement of our findings against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," the statement read. 'Risk to Erode Credibility' The regulator's announcement declared: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the documentary's omission to reveal that the voice's parent served in a post in the Hamas-run administration was substantially inaccurate. "Consequently that the audience did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the presenter and the information he provided. "Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a television network and its viewers, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation. "This error had the possibility to erode the very considerable degrees of confidence that audiences would have put in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza." The programme 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 broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it breached the organization's editorial guidelines on truthfulness. A BBC spokesperson stated: "The regulator's decision is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards. "We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the directive as soon as the timing and language are determined."