(Adds comments by Ban) By Louis Charbonneau UNITED NATIONS, Jan 12 (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon heads to the Middle East this week to press for an end to the violence in Gaza, carrying a message addressed to both Israel and Hamas that he summarized on Monday as "Just stop, now." Among the leaders Ban intends to meet are Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, King Abdullah of Jordan and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. He will also go to Lebanon and Turkey to meet leaders there. But at a news conference before his departure, Ban indicated he would not visit Gaza itself or have direct contact with leaders of Hamas, the Islamist movement that has controlled the territory since 2007. Instead he will talk to leaders of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. "My goal is to step up the pace of our joint diplomatic efforts and ensure that humanitarian assistance reaches those in need," Ban told reporters. "My message is simple, direct and to the point: the fighting must stop. To both sides, I say: Just stop now." Israel's 17-day military campaign against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip, aimed at stamping out rocket fire aimed at southern Israel, is expected to dominate all of his meetings in the Middle East, diplomats and U.N. officials said. Ban leaves for the region on Tuesday and is due back in New York a week later. International Middle East envoy Tony Blair said after talks with Egypt's Mubarak on Monday that "the elements of an agreement of the immediate ceasefire are there and are now being worked on very hard in great detail." Mubarak has been pushing a ceasefire proposal that Israel has said it was willing to consider. QUIET DIPLOMACY Hamas official Osama Hamdan said delegates who held talks in Cairo on Sunday on a ceasefire had returned to Damascus for consultations with the group's leadership and to formulate a final position on the Egyptian initiative. Israel, which rejected a U.N. ceasefire resolution last week as unworkable, wants Hamas rocket attacks to end and to prevent Hamas from rearming via tunnels under the Egypt-Gaza border, in an area known as the Philadelphi corridor. Ban has been unusually vocal during the Gaza crisis, repeatedly calling on both sides to halt their attacks as civilian casualties in Gaza mount. He told Olmert in a telephone call on Friday he was disappointed the Security Council's ceasefire resolution had been ignored. The South Korean U.N. secretary-general's predecessor, Kofi Annan, emerged as a key mediator in the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon. He helped broker a ceasefire and the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers. Diplomats at the United Nations say that Ban is less charismatic than Annan but that his brand of "quiet diplomacy" might be effective in the current crisis. They say he proved an able mediator with the military junta in Myanmar after a devastating cyclone there last year and with Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir in urging him to speed up deployment of U.N.-African Union peacekeepers in Sudan's war-ravaged Darfur region. Ban, who will return to New York on Jan. 20, the day Barack Obama is installed in the White House, said he hoped to meet the incoming U.S. president as soon as possible. He said he would like to reaffirm to Obama his hope that he would treat the Middle East as a priority. Obama said on Sunday he would begin the search for Middle East peace immediately. (Additional reporting by Patrick Worsnip; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
Israeli reservists prepare to cross the border into the northern Gaza Strip January 12, 2009. An Israeli military spokesman said army reservists had been thrown into the campaign that Israel launched ...
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