🔗 Share this article British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Ruled a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog The public service broadcaster committed a "major breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom. An investigation by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive". The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness". The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to air a prime-time statement about its conclusions. "Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a announcement of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be confirmed," the statement read. 'Possibility to Damage Credibility' The regulator's announcement declared: "Our investigation determined that the documentary's failure to disclose that the voice's father served in a role in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate. "This implied that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he provided. "Trust is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster. "This oversight had the potential to undermine the very considerable amounts of trust that the public would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war." The film was withdrawn from the online platform in February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in the month of July an internal BBC review concluded it breached the corporation's content policies on truthfulness. A representative for the broadcaster said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations. "We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in full. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the date and language are confirmed."