The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has ordered the broadcaster to air a peak-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.
'Risk to Undermine Trust'
The regulator's statement stated: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the voice's male guardian occupied a post in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
"It meant that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he shared.
"Credibility is at the core of the connection between a television network and its audience, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the potential to undermine the exceptionally strong amounts of credibility that audiences would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was removed from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the boy's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it infringed the corporation's content policies on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."
