BBC Gaza Film Deemed a 'Significant' Violation of Media Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog

The British broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a film about Gaza was the son of a Hamas official, according to regulatory body Ofcom.

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

The BBC's director general had previously apologised, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".

The authority has directed the BBC to air a peak-time declaration about its decisions.

"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our regulations, we are ordering the BBC to air a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be confirmed," the regulator stated.

'Potential to Undermine Credibility'

The watchdog's announcement stated: "The inquiry we conducted found that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent held a position in the Hamas-administered administration was substantially inaccurate.

"This implied that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the voice and the content he presented.

"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.

"This failing had the risk to damage the exceptionally strong amounts of credibility that the public would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."

The programme was pulled from iPlayer in February after the boy's family links emerged, and in July an corporation's own inquiry determined it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.

A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and wording are determined."