The Prevention of Infiltration Law (Hebrew: חוק למניעת הסתננות (עבירות ושיפוט)) is a 1954 Israeli law that deals with the offense of unauthorized entry by armed and unarmed foreigners into Israel. It authorizes the Minister of Defense to order the immediate deportation of any detained infiltrator before or after their conviction.^{[citation needed]}

One of the primary objectives of the law was to prevent the entry of Palestinian fedayeen into Israel's territory, as defined by the 1949 Armistice Agreements, and allows for their expulsion.

After the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, many Palestinian Arabs who either fled or were expelled from their homes, whether they had altogether ventured beyond what became Israel (largely into the neighbouring Arab countries: Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt) or were internally displaced, tried for many years since then to return to the places they had left.

The law also originally designated Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, and Yemen as "enemy states" of Israel. Egypt and Jordan were removed from the list after the signing of peace accords with these countries in 1979 and 1994, while Iran was added to the list after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Israeli citizens may not visit countries designated as enemy states without a permit issued by the Israeli Interior Ministry. In January 2020, Israel's Minister of the Interior said Israeli citizens, both Muslims and Jews, can travel to Saudi Arabia for religious and business purposes. (These countries also generally ban entry of Israelis, though they have permitted entry in exceptional circumstances.)

The law was amended in 2013, in the context of Illegal immigration into Israel from Africa, setting limitations on the time an infiltrator could be detained, increasing the number of anti-infiltration enforcement officers, and increase compensation to infiltrators who willingly returned to their own countries.

Palestinian infiltration into Israel began with Palestinian refugees of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, living in camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria. Most of the infiltration at this time was economic in nature, with Palestinians crossing the border seeking food or the recovery of property lost in the 1948 war. Between 1948 and 1955, Palestinian infiltration into Israel was firmly opposed by Arab governments.

The problem of establishing and guarding the demarcation line separating the Gaza Strip from the Israeli-held Negev area, proved a vexing one: largely due to the presence of more than 200,000 Palestinian Arab refugees in the Gaza Strip. The terms of the Armistice Agreement restricted Egypt's use and deployment of regular armed forces in the Gaza Strip. In keeping with this restriction the Egyptian Government formed a Palestinian para-military police force, the Palestinian Border police, in December 1952. The Border police was under the command of 'Abd-al-Man'imi 'Abd-al-Ra'uf, a former Egyptian air brigade commander, member of the Muslim Brotherhood and member of the Revolutionary Council. 250 Palestinian volunteers started training in March 1953 with further volunteers coming forward for training in May and December 1953. Part of the Border police personnel were attached to the Military Governor's office and placed under 'Abd-al-'Azim al-Saharti to guard public installations in the Gaza Strip. It was only after Israel's raid on an Egyptian military outpost in Gaza in February 1955, in which 37 Egyptian soldiers were killed, that an Arab government—in this case the Egyptian—began to actively sponsor fedayeen raids into Israel. According to the Jewish Agency for Israel between 1951 and 1956, 400 Israelis were killed and 900 wounded in fedayeen attacks.

From time to time, too, the Israeli authorities arrested groups of Arabs who had stayed in the country without being granted Israeli nationality and pushed them over the frontier. These Arabs would often return and, through their relatives, obtain decisions from the Israeli courts allowing them to stay in Israel.