🔗 Share this article British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Considered a 'Major' Violation of Broadcasting Standards, Says Broadcasting Watchdog The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the voice of a programme about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas administrator, according to regulatory body Ofcom. An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "materially misleading". The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy". The authority has ordered the BBC to air a peak-time announcement about its decisions. "As this represents a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to air a announcement of our conclusions 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 Erode Trust' The authority's report said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the presenter's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-administered administration was significantly deceptive. "This implied that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their judgment of the narrator and the information he provided. "Trust is at the center of the connection between a television network and its public, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster. "This oversight had the possibility to erode the very considerable degrees of credibility that the public would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict." The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in February after the presenter's family links came to light, and in the month of July an internal BBC review concluded it breached the organization's content policies on accuracy. A BBC spokesperson stated: "The regulator's decision is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations. "We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and language are determined."