BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, Declares UK Media Regulator

The BBC was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

An probe by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".

The head of the BBC had previously apologised, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".

The authority has directed the BBC to air a peak-time announcement about its conclusions.

"As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to air a statement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be determined," the regulator stated.

'Risk to Damage Trust'

The regulator's announcement stated: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's male guardian occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled administration was significantly deceptive.

"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the voice and the details he shared.

"Trust is at the core of the bond between a television network and its viewers, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This error had the risk to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that audiences would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."

The film was withdrawn from the online platform in last February after the presenter's personal associations were revealed, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy.

A BBC spokesperson commented: "The authority's determination is in line with the results 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 the regulator's media standards.

"We have apologised for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will comply with the directive as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."