🔗 Share this article British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Major' Infringement of Media Standards, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas representative, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom. An inquiry by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "materially misleading". The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness". The authority has ordered the BBC to air a prime-time announcement about its conclusions. "Given this constitutes a serious breach of our code, we are directing the broadcaster to air a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be confirmed," the statement read. 'Possibility to Erode Confidence' The watchdog's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent occupied a post in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate. "This implied that the public did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the voice and the content he shared. "Confidence is at the heart of the relationship between a television network and its audience, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC. "This failing had the possibility to damage the very considerable amounts of confidence that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict." The programme was removed from the online platform in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in July an internal BBC review found it violated the organization's journalistic standards on factual correctness. A BBC spokesperson said: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards. "We expressed regret for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the date and language are confirmed."