🔗 Share this article BBC Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Standards, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom. An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "materially misleading". The BBC's director general had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy". The regulator has directed the broadcaster to broadcast a evening declaration about its conclusions. "As this represents a significant violation of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be confirmed," the regulator stated. 'Risk to Damage Confidence' The authority's announcement said: "Our investigation found that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent occupied a position in the Hamas-controlled government was significantly deceptive. "This implied that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he provided. "Confidence is at the core of the connection between a television network and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster. "This oversight had the risk to undermine the significantly high degrees of confidence that audiences would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war." The film was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's familial connections came to light, and in July an corporation's own inquiry determined it breached the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness. A corporation official commented: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which reflects clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code. "We expressed regret for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and language are finalised."