🔗 Share this article British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Significant' Breach of Media Rules, Declares Ofcom The BBC committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas representative, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom. An probe by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive". The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness". The authority has instructed the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time statement about its decisions. "As this represents a significant violation of our code, we are instructing the broadcaster to air a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," it said. 'Risk to Undermine Credibility' The regulator's statement stated: "Our probe found that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's father served in a post in the Hamas-controlled administration was substantially inaccurate. "Consequently that the public did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he presented. "Credibility is at the heart of the bond between a television network and its audience, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC. "This oversight had the potential to damage the very considerable levels of confidence that the public would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war." The documentary was removed from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review concluded it violated the broadcaster's content policies on factual correctness. A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards. "We have apologised for this and we comply with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."