BBC Gaza Film Ruled a 'Significant' Breach of Media Regulations, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog

The BBC committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the voice of a film about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas official, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.

An probe by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".

The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".

The authority has ordered the corporation to broadcast a evening statement about its conclusions.

"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be finalised," the statement read.

'Potential to Damage Credibility'

The regulator's report stated: "Our probe determined that the programme's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent served in a post in the Hamas-controlled administration was materially misleading.

"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the narrator and the details he shared.

"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a broadcaster and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.

"This oversight had the risk to damage the significantly high degrees of credibility that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."

The programme was withdrawn from the online platform in February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in the month of July an internal BBC review found it breached the organization's editorial guidelines on accuracy.

A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the date and language are confirmed."