🔗 Share this article British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Breach of Media Regulations, Declares Ofcom The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the presenter of a programme about Gaza was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom. An investigation by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive". The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness". The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time announcement about its findings. "As this represents a significant violation of our regulations, we are directing the corporation to transmit a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a timing to be confirmed," it said. 'Possibility to Damage Trust' The regulator's announcement said: "Our investigation concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the narrator's father served in a position in the Hamas-administered government was materially misleading. "Consequently that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the presenter and the content he provided. "Confidence is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation. "This failing had the risk to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of trust that the public would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict." The film was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in February after the boy's personal associations were revealed, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy. A BBC spokesperson said: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code. "We expressed regret for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and language are finalised."