Protecting branches with different numbers of approvers

We are moving to Gitlab, and after having a member of the team accidentally commit to master I’m setting up protection and approvals.

In our workflow we have feature branches coming off master and being merged to a dev branch for testing, and then the feature branch is merged to master. It is pretty simple make master protected and ensure that at least one person reviews the code. But the dev branch becomes harder, as this is basically first point of testing, so that is constantly deployed and I do not want people committing to it, but I also don’t need this to be code reviewed yet. Is there a way of preventing merges to master without an approval, but only prevent commits to the dev branch and not require any approvals for a merge?