Gamal is the third letter of the Syriac abjad and writes g. It joins on both sides and takes the full set of positional shapes. Like beth, dalath, kaph, pe and taw it carries a hard and a soft reading, and the soft reading is a voiced velar fricative, the sound written gh in transcriptions of Arabic. Its numeral value is three.
Its name is the inherited word for a camel, one of the Northwest Semitic nouns that the letter names preserve. The noun describes a sign of the older linear alphabet and no longer describes anything in the Syriac form, which is drawn quite differently in Estrangela, in Serto and in Madnhaya and looks like nothing in particular in any of them. The entry here is for the letter, not for one hand.
Gamal has a further use outside Syriac itself. Where the Syriac letters are used to write Arabic, a practice known as Garshuni, a separately marked gamal stands for the Arabic jim. That sign belongs to Garshuni and is not a twenty-third letter of the alphabet, which is why the count of the Syriac abjad stays at twenty-two however many marked variants a particular manuscript shows. The distinction matters when reading a character inventory: a list of encoded Syriac characters is much longer than a list of Syriac letters, and the extra signs are borrowings, ligatures and positional variants rather than additions to the alphabet.