The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has instructed the BBC to broadcast a prime-time announcement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are ordering the broadcaster to broadcast a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Undermine Credibility'
The authority's statement stated: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father served in a role in the Hamas-run government was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their assessment of the voice and the information he presented.
"Trust is at the core of the connection between a media organization and its audience, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This error had the possibility to erode the significantly high degrees of trust that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in February after the boy's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The regulator's decision is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
