🔗 Share this article BBC Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Serious' Violation of Broadcasting Rules, Declares Ofcom The BBC committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the voice of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas representative, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom. An inquiry 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 significant failing in relation to accuracy". The regulator has instructed the BBC to broadcast a prime-time declaration about its decisions. "Since this amounts to a major infringement of our regulations, we are instructing the broadcaster to air a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," the regulator stated. 'Possibility to Damage Confidence' The regulator's statement said: "Our investigation found that the film's lack of disclosure that the presenter's father held a role in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate. "Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their assessment of the voice and the content he provided. "Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC. "This failing had the possibility to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that viewers would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict." The documentary was withdrawn from the online platform in last February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the broadcaster's content policies on factual correctness. A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations. "We issued an apology for this and we accept the authority's determination in full. We will follow the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."