🔗 Share this article BBC Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares UK Media Regulator The BBC was found to have committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom. An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled 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 significant failing in relation to accuracy". The authority has directed the corporation to transmit a peak-time statement about its findings. "Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the corporation to air a statement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be finalised," the regulator stated. 'Potential to Erode Trust' The authority's announcement declared: "The inquiry we conducted found that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's father occupied a post in the Hamas-run administration was substantially inaccurate. "Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the narrator and the details he provided. "Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation. "This oversight had the possibility to damage the significantly high degrees of credibility that audiences would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war." The programme was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the boy's familial connections were revealed, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it breached the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness. A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards. "We have apologised for this and we agree with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and language are determined."