🔗 Share this article BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Infringement of Media Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog The BBC committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas official, according to regulatory body Ofcom. An inquiry by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "materially misleading". The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness". The regulator has ordered the BBC to air a peak-time declaration about its findings. "Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a statement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," the statement read. 'Possibility to Erode Trust' The authority's report stated: "Our investigation concluded that the film's lack of disclosure that the voice's parent held a post in the Hamas-run government was substantially inaccurate. "Consequently that the audience did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the narrator and the content he shared. "Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a television network and its audience, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster. "This oversight had the possibility to undermine the exceptionally strong levels of confidence that audiences would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war." The documentary was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the presenter's family links were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the corporation's editorial guidelines on truthfulness. A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code. "We have apologised for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are determined."