🔗 Share this article British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Major' Infringement of Broadcasting Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog The BBC committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas representative, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom. An inquiry by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate". The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness". Ofcom has ordered the BBC to air a prime-time declaration about its conclusions. "Given this constitutes a serious breach of our code, we are ordering the corporation to air a announcement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be determined," the regulator stated. 'Risk to Damage Trust' The watchdog's report said: "Our probe concluded that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the voice's parent held a role in the Hamas-run government was significantly deceptive. "Consequently that the audience did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the presenter and the details he provided. "Confidence is at the core of the connection between a media organization and its public, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation. "This failing had the possibility to damage the very considerable degrees of confidence that viewers would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war." The film was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's personal associations emerged, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry determined it breached the organization's editorial guidelines on truthfulness. A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards. "We expressed regret for this and we agree with the authority's determination in full. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are determined."