🔗 Share this article British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Major' Violation of Broadcasting Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza was the child of a Hamas official, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom. An probe by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "materially misleading". The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy". The authority has ordered the corporation to broadcast a prime-time announcement about its findings. "Given this constitutes a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the broadcaster to transmit a statement of our findings against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a timing to be confirmed," the regulator stated. 'Risk to Damage Confidence' The authority's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father occupied a post in the Hamas-run administration was substantially inaccurate. "This implied that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the narrator and the content he presented. "Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its public, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC. "This oversight had the possibility to damage the very considerable levels of trust that viewers would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war." The programme was withdrawn from the online platform in the month of February after the boy's family links were revealed, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it breached the broadcaster's content policies on factual correctness. A corporation official commented: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards. "We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in full. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the date and wording are determined."