🔗 Share this article British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Significant' Infringement of Media Rules, States Broadcasting Watchdog The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a film about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, according to regulatory body Ofcom. An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate". The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy". The authority has instructed the BBC to transmit a evening announcement about its findings. "Since this amounts to a major infringement of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to air a statement of our findings against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a schedule to be finalised," the regulator stated. 'Possibility to Undermine Confidence' The regulator's statement declared: "Our probe concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the narrator's male guardian served in a post in the Hamas-administered authority was substantially inaccurate. "It meant that the public did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the voice and the details he provided. "Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster. "This failing had the risk to undermine the very considerable degrees of trust that the public would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war." The programme was withdrawn from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it breached the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on truthfulness. A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code. "We issued an apology for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in full. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."