🔗 Share this article BBC Gaza Film Considered a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, Says Broadcasting Watchdog The British broadcaster committed a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom. An probe by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "substantially inaccurate". The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness". The authority has directed the broadcaster to air a evening declaration about its decisions. "Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are directing the broadcaster to transmit a message of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a date to be finalised," it said. 'Risk to Undermine Credibility' The authority's report declared: "Our probe found that the programme's omission to reveal that the presenter's father held a role in the Hamas-run authority was significantly deceptive. "It meant that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their assessment of the presenter and the content he provided. "Confidence is at the heart of the relationship between a television network and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation. "This error had the risk to damage the significantly high levels of credibility that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza." The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in February after the boy's personal associations emerged, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry found it violated the corporation's content policies on factual correctness. A BBC spokesperson commented: "The regulator's decision is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code. "We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."