🔗 Share this article British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Serious' Violation of Media Regulations, States Ofcom The British broadcaster committed a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about Gaza was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom. An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive". The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness". The authority has ordered the corporation to air a peak-time declaration about its conclusions. "Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a statement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a schedule to be finalised," the regulator stated. 'Possibility to Undermine Trust' The watchdog's report said: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent held a position in the Hamas-run government was materially misleading. "This implied that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their assessment of the narrator and the details he shared. "Credibility is at the center of the bond between a media organization and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC. "This oversight had the potential to erode the significantly high levels of credibility that the public would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict." The documentary was withdrawn from iPlayer in last February after the presenter's familial connections came to light, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it violated the organization's journalistic standards on factual correctness. A BBC spokesperson said: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code. "We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the directive as soon as the date and wording are determined."