🔗 Share this article BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog The BBC was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the voice of a film about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas representative, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom. An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "significantly deceptive". The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness". Ofcom has instructed the corporation to transmit a prime-time announcement about its findings. "As this represents a major infringement of our regulations, we are ordering the broadcaster to air a announcement of our findings against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be determined," the statement read. 'Possibility to Erode Trust' The regulator's announcement said: "Our investigation concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the voice's parent occupied a role in the Hamas-run authority was significantly deceptive. "It meant that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he presented. "Trust is at the center of the connection between a broadcaster and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC. "This failing had the potential to damage the significantly high amounts of confidence that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict." The documentary was withdrawn from iPlayer in February after the boy's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it breached the corporation's content policies on truthfulness. A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code. "We have apologised for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in full. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the timing and language are determined."