🔗 Share this article BBC Gaza Film Considered a 'Major' Violation of Broadcasting Regulations, Says Ofcom The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the voice of a film about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas official, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom. An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "materially misleading". The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness". Ofcom has ordered the corporation to air a peak-time announcement about its conclusions. "Given this constitutes a significant violation of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a statement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a date to be confirmed," the statement read. 'Risk to Undermine Credibility' The authority's statement declared: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the film's failure to disclose that the narrator's parent occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled authority was substantially inaccurate. "Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their judgment of the narrator and the details he shared. "Trust is at the center of the connection between a television network and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation. "This error had the risk to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of trust that the public would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war." The programme was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the presenter's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it violated the corporation's editorial guidelines on truthfulness. A BBC spokesperson commented: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations. "We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in full. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the date and language are finalised."