🔗 Share this article BBC Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Significant' Violation of Media Rules, Declares Ofcom The British broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the presenter of a film about Gaza was the child of a Hamas official, as determined 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 "significantly deceptive". The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy". The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time announcement about its decisions. "Given this constitutes a significant violation of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a date to be finalised," the statement read. 'Risk to Undermine Trust' The authority's announcement stated: "Our investigation found that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father held a position in the Hamas-controlled government was materially misleading. "Consequently that the public did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he provided. "Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a broadcaster and its viewers, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation. "This error had the risk to damage the significantly high amounts of credibility that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza." The programme was pulled from the online platform in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations emerged, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on accuracy. A BBC spokesperson stated: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards. "We have apologised for this and we accept the authority's determination in full. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and language are determined."