The quintessential gentleman reporter – a Labour Zionist of the old school – he had an unerring eye for the fascinating and bizarre.

Born and brought up in Leeds, his family with roots in Lithuania, he went to Roundhay School in north Leeds.

From the grammar school he won an exhibition to St Catherine's College, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics and economics. After graduating, he worked for a spell in the provincial press and in 1960 he joined the Manchester Guardian.

When the paper moved its headquarters to London in 1964 and became the Guardian, he followed it south as a general reporter, taking a particular interest in immigration and race.

In 1967 the paper sent him to Israel to cover the aftermath of the Six-Day War, and in 1972, he was appointed Jerusalem correspondent of both The Guardian and The Observer.

His subsequent career would see him cover the succession of stories which marked a turbulent era.

He reported on the Lod airport massacre of May 30, 1972, when three members of the Japanese Red Army killed 26 people and injured 80 when they opened fire on passengers at what is now Ben Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv.

The next outrage Eric would cover was the Munich Olympics attack in the summer of 1972 when Black September terrorists took members of the Israeli Olympics team hostage.

He covered the Yom Kippur War when on October 6, 1973, the combined armies of Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in the Suez Canal area and the Golan Heights, and the visit to Israel of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt.

In 1983 he was persuaded to move to Delhi as The Guardian's India correspondent, and in 1987, after nearly three decades working for the paper, he and his wife Bridget decided to make their home in Jerusalem where he worked as a freelance correspondent.

Eric had been a member of the Habonim Zionist youth movement, but his ambition to be a journalist came before everything else, and his Zionism remained an undercurrent until he was able to combine life in Israel with journalism.

With the intifada once again turning the world's attention on the Middle East, he wrote for The Independent and the Jewish Chronicle and became a regular contributor to the BBC World Service. He also did work for Newsnight and CNN. He is survived by his wife and their daughters Rachel, Sharon and Dinah.