The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the voice of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas representative, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has instructed the BBC to air a prime-time statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our regulations, we are ordering the BBC to air a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Undermine Trust'
The watchdog's report declared: "Our probe concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's male guardian occupied a post in the Hamas-administered administration was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the audience did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he provided.
"Trust is at the heart of the bond between a broadcaster and its public, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the possibility to damage the very considerable degrees of confidence that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was withdrawn from iPlayer in February after the presenter's family links came to light, and in this past July an internal BBC review determined it infringed the organization's content policies on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
