Seasoned Hand in Mideast May Shepherd Peace Talks

As he has pushed for resumption of the talks, Mr. Kerry has essentially served as his own special envoy, engaging in round-the-clock meetings with Israeli and Palestinian officials during six trips to the Middle East and making countless phone calls.

But with the negotiations due to start in the next week or so, and Mr. Kerry intent on assuming his broader responsibilities as secretary of state, he has begun to assemble a team that would manage what one senior State Department official said is expected to be “a rocky and up-and-down process.”

Channel 2 News in Israel reported that Mr. Kerry had told the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, that Mr. Indyk was his choice; the channel said both leaders expressed approval.

The State Department did not dispute that Mr. Indyk was being considered as an envoy to the talks, as first reported by the online publication Al-Monitor, but asserted Sunday that final decisions on the team had yet to be made.

“Kerry is still very much in the process of making decisions on who will be a part of the effort,” a senior State Department official said.

Mr. Indyk, a veteran of Middle East diplomacy, is currently the foreign policy director at the Brookings Institution. Ehud Yaari, the Arab affairs analyst for the Israeli news channel and a fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said on Sunday that Mr. Indyk “knows all the players very well and has their respect.”

Mr. Indyk served during the Clinton administration as assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs; he has also worked on Middle East policy on the National Security Council.

In March 1995, President Bill Clinton dispatched him to Israel as ambassador, where he worked with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the still-evolving Oslo peace process, less than two years after the Israelis and Palestinians signed their first accords.

Mr. Rabin was assassinated later that year. The subsequent elections, held after a spate of deadly Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel, were won by Mr. Netanyahu, the leader of the conservative Likud Party.

Mr. Indyk was sent again to Israel as ambassador in 2000, to work with Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister, on an ambitious bid for a peace deal, but that effort failed, and the second Palestinian intifada erupted.

Dore Gold, who was Mr. Netanyahu’s foreign policy adviser in the 1990s, said that Mr. Indyk was “a pivotal figure” during Mr. Netanyahu’s first term in office. “It’s very important to have people with an institutional memory of past negotiations, despite the fact that we are in a whole new era now,” Mr. Gold said.

Mr. Indyk has maintained a good rapport with Mr. Abbas, and has also conferred with Mr. Netanyahu.

Frank Lowenstein, Mr. Kerry’s longtime adviser on Middle East issues, is also expected to remain heavily involved in the talks.

On Friday, Mr. Kerry announced that an agreement had been reached establishing “a basis” for resuming final status talks between Israel and the Palestinians, a breakthrough after years of deadlock. But senior Palestinian officials asserted on Sunday that several issues needed to be resolved before the Palestinian side could fully agree to return to negotiations.

It was possible that the Palestinian officials were playing to public opinion at home. But American officials have declined to discuss the details of what has been agreed, making it difficult to assess how much progress has been made.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for Mr. Abbas, said in a telephone interview on Sunday that “in principle, the road is paved” for Israeli and Palestinian delegations to meet in Washington in the next week or so.