🔗 Share this article BBC Gaza Film Considered a 'Major' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, Declares Ofcom The BBC committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the presenter of a film about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom. An investigation by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "significantly deceptive". The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness". The authority has directed the BBC to air a evening declaration about its decisions. "As this represents a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the broadcaster to air a message of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be finalised," the statement read. 'Risk to Erode Confidence' The regulator's report stated: "The inquiry we conducted found that the film's lack of disclosure that the voice's father occupied a role in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate. "This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their assessment of the narrator and the content he shared. "Credibility is at the core of the connection between a media organization and its audience, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC. "This failing had the potential to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that the public would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict." The documentary was removed from the online platform in February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it breached the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness. A corporation official commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations. "We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and language are determined."