🔗 Share this article BBC Gaza Film Deemed a 'Major' Violation of Broadcasting Rules, Declares UK Media Regulator The public service broadcaster committed a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas official, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom. An inquiry by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate". The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness". The regulator has ordered the broadcaster to air a evening statement about its conclusions. "Given this constitutes a major infringement of our regulations, we are instructing the corporation to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be finalised," the regulator stated. 'Risk to Undermine Confidence' The regulator's statement said: "Our probe determined that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father held a post in the Hamas-run administration was substantially inaccurate. "It meant that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the presenter and the content he presented. "Credibility is at the core of the bond between a television network and its viewers, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster. "This failing had the potential to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza." The programme was removed from iPlayer in the month of February after the presenter's familial connections were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on accuracy. A representative for the broadcaster said: "The regulator's decision is in line with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code. "We have apologised for this and we agree with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the directive as soon as the date and language are confirmed."