BBC News chief Deborah Turness is understood to have watched the controversial Gaza documentary weeks before broadcast but failed to question its content.
The senior executive attended a special screening of "Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone" on January 30, almost three weeks before it aired.
The documentary has since been removed from iPlayer after it emerged the boy narrating the programme was the son of a senior Hamas official.
The BBC has identified "serious flaws in the making of the programme", including its own failure to uncover the Hamas connection.
BBC News chief Deborah Turness is understood to have watched the controversial Gaza documentary weeks before broadcast but failed to question its content
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The corporation also admitted payments were made to the Hamas official's family.
A BBC source said Turness, who earns more than £410,000 a year, assumed the programme was fully compliant with BBC guidelines when she watched it, The Telegraph reports.
The source said she did not question any elements because it was being shown as the finished product.
The BBC has admitted asking the independent makers of the documentary "a number of times" in writing if the boy and his family had connections to Hamas.
The documentary was not broadcast until February 19, almost three weeks after the screening attended by Turness.
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A source inside the BBC insisted her attendance at the screening was "common practice".
"We didn't give this documentary any special treatment. This was a compiled programme by the time she [Turness] saw it. It was a finished programme," the source said.
"She saw it in her capacity as CEO of BBC News, knowing it is a finished product, rather than with a compliance eye on it. She would have assumed the due diligence checks had already taken place."
The source added that responsibility for compliance lay with the documentary's commissioning editors and Jo Carr, the BBC's head of current affairs.
The senior executive attended a special screening of 'Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone' on January 30, almost three weeks before it aired
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A spokesman for UK Lawyers for Israel, which complained to police about possible payments to Hamas, said: "This must raise questions about her ability to do the job. She should have raised questions about compliance."
Sir Michael Ellis, the former attorney general, said: "This has been a shocking and disgraceful failure of compliance. BBC management must take full responsibility."
Tim Davie, the BBC's director-general, and Dr Samir Shah, the BBC chairman, will face questioning at a parliamentary select committee on Tuesday.
One insider on the Culture, Media and Sport Committee said: "This is clearly very bad for the BBC and the committee is going to give them a very hard time over it."
The BBC has acknowledged in a statement that the incident has "damaged" public trust.
