British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, Declares Ofcom

The BBC committed a "major breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.

An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "materially misleading".

The head of the BBC had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".

Ofcom has directed the BBC to transmit a evening announcement about its findings.

"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a announcement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," the statement read.

'Risk to Erode Confidence'

The regulator's announcement said: "Our probe concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the presenter's father occupied a position in the Hamas-run government was significantly deceptive.

"It meant that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the narrator and the content he presented.

"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its audience, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.

"This error had the risk to damage the very considerable degrees of credibility that viewers would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."

The documentary was removed from the online platform in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.

A BBC spokesperson stated: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.

"We issued an apology for this and we accept the authority's determination in full. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the date and language are determined."