🔗 Share this article BBC Gaza Programme Considered a 'Significant' Breach of Media Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom. An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "substantially inaccurate". The BBC's director general had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy". Ofcom has instructed the corporation to broadcast a peak-time statement about its decisions. "Given this constitutes a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," the regulator stated. 'Risk to Erode Trust' The authority's report said: "Our investigation concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the presenter's father occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled administration was materially misleading. "Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their assessment of the narrator and the content he presented. "Trust is at the core of the relationship between a broadcaster and its viewers, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster. "This failing had the risk to damage the very considerable levels of trust that audiences would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza." The film was pulled from the online platform in the month of February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review concluded it violated the broadcaster's content policies on accuracy. A BBC spokesperson commented: "The authority's determination is in line with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards. "We expressed regret for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."