🔗 Share this article

The BBC engaged in a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas representative, according to regulatory body Ofcom.

An inquiry by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "materially misleading".

The head of the BBC had previously apologised, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".

The regulator has instructed the BBC to broadcast a peak-time statement about its findings.

"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our code, we are instructing the BBC to air a statement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," the regulator stated.

'Risk to Undermine Credibility'

The watchdog's statement said: "Our investigation determined that the programme's lack of disclosure that the presenter's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-administered government was materially misleading.

"It meant that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he presented.

"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its viewers, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.

"This error had the risk to erode the significantly high levels of credibility that audiences would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."

The documentary was pulled from the online platform in last February after the boy's family links were revealed, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry determined it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.

A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.

"We have apologised for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."