Among the leaders Ban intends to meet are Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his foreign minister Tzipi Livni, King Abdullah of Jordan and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. He will also travel to Lebanon and Turkey to meet leaders there.
Israel's military campaign against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip is expected to dominate all of his meetings in the Middle East, diplomats and U.N. officials said.
"He's very keen to be out there calling for a ceasefire," said one U.N. official. "Just stop the fighting, stop it now."
Ban leaves for the region Tuesday and is expected back in New York a week later, U.N. officials said.
International Middle East envoy Tony Blair said after talks with Egypt's Mubarak 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.
Hamas official Osama Hamdan said delegates who held talks in Cairo 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 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.
National diplomats accredited to 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 in early 2008 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.
