The British broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas official, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has directed the broadcaster to broadcast a peak-time statement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a message of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Undermine Trust'
The watchdog's announcement said: "Our investigation found that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's father served in a position in the Hamas-run authority was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Trust is at the heart of the bond between a media organization and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the potential to undermine the significantly high amounts of trust that viewers would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was removed from the online platform in February after the boy's family links were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry determined it violated the organization's content policies on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
