The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The authority has directed the broadcaster to air a prime-time statement about its findings.
"As this represents a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a statement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a date to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Damage Trust'
The regulator's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the film's lack of disclosure that the presenter's parent occupied a post in the Hamas-run government was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the public did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the voice and the details he presented.
"Confidence is at the center of the connection between a broadcaster and its viewers, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the potential to damage the significantly high amounts of credibility that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was removed from the online platform in February after the boy's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which reflects clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
