🔗 Share this article British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Significant' Violation of Media Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog The BBC committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the narrator of a film about Gaza was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom. An probe by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "significantly deceptive". The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness". Ofcom has instructed the broadcaster to transmit a evening announcement about its findings. "Since this amounts to a major infringement of our regulations, we are ordering the broadcaster to broadcast a announcement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a schedule to be confirmed," the regulator stated. 'Risk to Damage Confidence' The authority's statement said: "Our probe found that the documentary's failure to disclose that the narrator's male guardian held a role in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate. "It meant that the audience did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the presenter and the information he presented. "Trust is at the core of the bond between a media organization and its public, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC. "This failing had the possibility to undermine the very considerable degrees of trust that audiences would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war." The programme was pulled from the online platform in February after the boy's family links emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness. A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The regulator's decision is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards. "We have apologised for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised."