🔗 Share this article BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Major' Violation of Media Regulations, Says Broadcasting Watchdog The BBC was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a film about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom. An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate". The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness". The authority has directed the BBC to transmit a prime-time declaration about its conclusions. "Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to air a message of our findings against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," it said. 'Potential to Damage Trust' The watchdog's announcement said: "Our probe found that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father served in a post in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading. "Consequently that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their judgment of the voice and the details he provided. "Confidence is at the center of the connection between a media organization and its public, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster. "This oversight had the potential to erode the significantly high degrees of confidence that the public would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war." The film was pulled from iPlayer in February after the narrator's personal associations emerged, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness. A BBC spokesperson stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations. "We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."