The BBC's Middle East editor breached the corporation's guidelines on accuracy and impartiality, an official report has concluded.

The BBC Trust's editorial standards committee ruled on complaints about two pieces by Jeremy Bowen, one online and one on Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent.

References in the web article to "Zionism's innate instinct to push out the frontier", Israel's "defiance of everyone's interpretation of international law except its own" and Israeli generals' sense they were dealing with "unfinished business" left over from the 1948 war of independence, broke BBC rules on accuracy, the committee said.

The Radio 4 broadcast inaccurately claimed the US considered a particular Israeli settlement to be illegal, but had not breached impartiality rules, the report found.

Bowen used the online article, published on the BBC News website on June 4 2007, to put the present-day Israeli-Palestinian conflict in context by explaining the events of the 1967 Six Day War.

Ruling that the article had breached the rules on impartiality, the committee said: "Readers might come away thinking that the interpretation offered was the only sensible view of the war.

"It was not necessary for equal space to be given to the other arguments, but ... the existence of alternative theses should have been more clearly signposted."

Bowen's report for From Our Own Correspondent on January 12 last year said the US government considered Har Homa, an Israeli settlement near Jerusalem, to be illegal.

This was based on information from an "authoritative source", the committee said, but there was no evidence the view was official US policy.

"The Middle East editor had stated his professional view without qualification or explanation, and that the lack of precision in his language had rendered the statement inaccurate," the report said.

The committee said if Bowen had given the basis for his statement, it would not have been inaccurate.

A spokesman for BBC News said of the ruling on the web article: "Our Middle East editor was simply exercising his professional judgment on history.

"Clearly there is no consensus view of history and it is self evident that there are others who have different analysis - which of course they are entitled to."