🔗 Share this article BBC Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Serious' Violation of Broadcasting Standards, Declares Ofcom The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the voice of a film about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas representative, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom. An investigation by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive". The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness". The authority has ordered the broadcaster to transmit a evening statement about its findings. "As this represents a significant violation of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to air a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a date to be determined," it said. 'Possibility to Undermine Trust' The watchdog's statement said: "Our probe found that the documentary's failure to disclose that the narrator's father held a position in the Hamas-administered authority was significantly deceptive. "Consequently that the audience did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he provided. "Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a media organization and its audience, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster. "This error had the potential to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of trust that the public would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict." The documentary was removed from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations emerged, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on truthfulness. A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code. "We have apologised for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and language are confirmed."