🔗 Share this article British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Significant' Violation of Media Rules, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog The BBC engaged in a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas official, according to regulatory body Ofcom. An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "substantially inaccurate". The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness". Ofcom has directed the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time declaration about its decisions. "Given this constitutes a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a statement of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," it said. 'Possibility to Undermine Trust' The regulator's announcement said: "Our investigation found that the documentary's failure to disclose that the voice's male guardian served in a position in the Hamas-administered administration was materially misleading. "Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their assessment of the voice and the information he presented. "Confidence is at the core of the connection between a television network and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation. "This failing had the risk to damage the significantly high amounts of confidence that audiences would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict." The programme was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the narrator's familial connections were revealed, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on truthfulness. A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards. "We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised."