The public service broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a film about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The authority has ordered the BBC to broadcast a prime-time statement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach 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 schedule to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Erode Confidence'
The regulator's report said: "The inquiry we conducted found that the film's failure to disclose that the presenter's male guardian held a position in the Hamas-administered government was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the audience did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their assessment of the presenter and the content he shared.
"Confidence is at the heart of the bond between a media organization and its public, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the potential to damage the very considerable amounts of confidence that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The film was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the presenter's personal associations were revealed, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we agree with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and language are finalised."
