🔗 Share this article BBC Gaza Film Ruled a 'Major' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, States Broadcasting Watchdog The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a film about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas official, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom. An probe by the media regulator 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 already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness". Ofcom has directed the BBC to transmit a peak-time announcement about its conclusions. "Given this constitutes a major infringement of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to air a statement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be determined," the regulator stated. 'Possibility to Damage Credibility' The authority's announcement said: "Our investigation determined that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's father held a role in the Hamas-controlled government was significantly deceptive. "It meant that the audience did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their assessment of the narrator and the information he shared. "Confidence is at the center of the connection between a broadcaster and its public, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster. "This oversight had the possibility to damage the significantly high amounts of confidence that the public would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza." The programme was removed from iPlayer in February after the presenter's personal associations came to light, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it breached the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness. A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations. "We have apologised for this and we agree with the authority's determination in complete. We will comply with the directive as soon as the timing and language are finalised."