🔗 Share this article British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Serious' Violation of Broadcasting Rules, Says Ofcom The BBC engaged in a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas representative, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom. An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "significantly deceptive". The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness". The authority has instructed the BBC to broadcast a prime-time statement about its decisions. "Since this amounts to a major infringement of our regulations, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a date to be finalised," the statement read. 'Possibility to Undermine Trust' The authority's report declared: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the presenter's parent served in a position in the Hamas-controlled administration was substantially inaccurate. "It meant that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the presenter and the information he provided. "Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a media organization and its viewers, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation. "This oversight had the risk to erode the significantly high degrees of confidence that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war." The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the presenter's family links were revealed, and in this past July an internal BBC review concluded it infringed the corporation's editorial guidelines on accuracy. A representative for the broadcaster said: "The regulator's decision is in line with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards. "We expressed regret for this and we comply with the authority's determination in full. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the date and language are confirmed."